Former Buckeye Shane Olivea breaks free of addiction, hopes to help others

Friday

Dec 23, 2016 at 12:01 AMDec 23, 2016 at 11:42 AM

Shane Olivea couldn't stop looking at his diploma on Sunday. He never thought he'd see the day. The starting right tackle on the Buckeyes' 2002 national championship team left school for the NFL, then saw his career disintegrate because of a painkiller addiction that doctors said should have killed him.

Bill Rabinowitz, The Columbus Dispatch

Shane Olivea couldn't stop looking at his diploma on Sunday.

He never thought he'd see the day. In fact, when the native of Long Island, New York, enrolled at Ohio State 17 years ago, graduating wasn't a priority. School was something to endure to stay eligible for football.

Olivea started at right tackle on the Buckeyes' 2002 national championship team. He left OSU after his senior season in 2003 without having earned a degree. But his goals in those days were clear: Play a decade or so in the NFL, get rich, and then go on about his life.

But life is full of detours, and Olivea had a doozy. Just when it looked like he had it made, his NFL career disintegrated because of a painkiller addiction that doctors said should have killed him.

Olivea has been clean for more than eight years. He has been humbled. He is grateful for those who stuck by him and clear-eyed about those who didn't. Now, he wants to become a college coach and perhaps help someone heading down the same treacherous path he did.

For that, he needed a college degree. So in the summer of 2015, he returned to Ohio State as a full-time student in the athletic department's degree completion program. Five days ago, at age 35, he got his reward.

"I looked at it like three times," Olivea said. "I never thought I'd ever see a college diploma with my name on it."

Sinking into addiction

Olivea had everything, or so it seemed. He had achieved his NFL dream. A seventh-round pick by the San Diego Chargers in 2004, he quickly surpassed his lowly draft status by making several all-rookie teams.

Entering his third season, Olivea had signed a contract extension with a $7.5 million signing bonus.

"I'd realized all my goals," he said. "Now what? I didn't have any more goals. I didn't have any more dreams. I'd done them.

"Everybody can tell you what to do to get to your dream. But when you actually achieve the dream that you have when you're 5, 6 or 7 years old - to be one of the rare few in the NFL - no one tells you what to do."

By then, however, the dream was already slipping away. Throughout college and during his rookie year, Olivea said, he didn't take any painkillers. But his first NFL season was a long one. He played 21 games, counting preseason and a wild-card playoff loss.

When it ended, he was so sore and exhausted that he barely left his bed for a week. Olivea then went out with a teammate who had a friend who offered him a Vicodin.

Almost immediately, he became hooked.

"There wasn't one day in the NFL I wasn't high on a pill after my rookie year," Olivea said.

This was not a case of him taking only an extra pill or two.

"At my height on Vicodin, I would take 125 a day," he said. "It got to the point I would take a pile of 15 Vicodin and would have to take them with chocolate milk. If I did it with water or Gatorade, I'd throw it up."

He said he didn't get the pills from the Chargers. He had his own sources, including one across the nearby border in Mexico. He would park his car at an Arby's, call a taxi driver he knew and pay him $100 to go to a Tijuana "pharmacy."

"You could buy anything you want if you had cash," Olivea said. "I'd go buy a couple hundred Vicodin, or by then I'd progressed to Oxycontin."

He said he bought 80-milligram Oxycontin pills and cut them into eighths. The Chargers typically played the later game on Sundays, so he'd watch pregame shows while snorting slivers of pills before driving to the stadium.

"How I functioned and played is head-scratching," he said.

But the drugs took a toll. He withdrew from teammates. His relationship with coaches and management soured. Late in the 2007 season, he was benched. His weight ballooned to almost 390 pounds.

When he became reluctant to respond even to his parents back home, they became alarmed.

"That was never the way our relationship was," said his mother, Jean. "I knew something was not right. You can't just ignore it."

She organized an intervention at Olivea's home. It was mostly friends and family, including older brother Jason, who read a letter he'd written out of concern. So did Chargers teammate Roman Oben, who'd become a mentor to Olivea.

"I told Shane that I loved him as a brother and a teammate, as someone who was an older veteran," said Oben, a one-time Cleveland Brown. 'I think I told him I noticed a behavior change that wasn't consistent with who I knew he could be. If that was the truth, then he needs to get as much help as possible. I actually remember tearing up."

When confronted, Olivea was relieved. He knew he had a problem. He just had been unwilling or unable to ask for help.

"I was too full of pride," Olivea said. "I always said that my pride got me to the NFL, and it got me to rehab. I'm an offensive lineman. You don't show pain. We're the tough guys on the team. We sort of suffer in silence. I wanted to reach out, that I needed help. I wanted to stop. I went through withdrawal, physical withdrawal. But I didn't know how to ask for help. It almost killed me."

That day, April 20, 2008, he checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Blood tests showed just how lucky he was. In fact, doctors who'd been at the center for 20 years made him repeat the tests because they couldn't believe the results.

"They both looked at me and said we've never seen anybody living with that amount of opioids in you. You're literally a walking miracle," Olivea said. "That was a punch to the gut."

He checked into a room that had a bed without a sheet, a pillow without a case and furniture bolted to the floor. It was early evening and the sun was setting. His beach house in Del Mar and $200,000 Mercedes were a couple of hours and a world away.

Olivea spent 89 days at the Betty Ford Center. At first, he took solace that he wasn't a crack or heroin addict who walked around the facility like a zombie.

"I'm like, 'I just took pills. I'm OK. I made it to the NFL. I can do this,'" Olivea said. "It just shows you how strong and how much of a hook those pills have. I didn't care about my career anymore. I didn't care about a lot of things. I didn't care about myself, unfortunately. You go there and you do a lot of soul-searching."

His time at Betty Ford may have saved his life. It did not save his NFL career. Released by the Chargers, Olivea signed with the New York Giants while in rehab.

He had to improvise a workout program while at Betty Ford. Olivea took a shopping cart, filled it with cinder blocks and used it as a blocking sled. He managed to lose 61 pounds. Four days after he was released, he was in training camp. But he injured his back and was placed on injured reserve and later released.

Later, he played for two teams in the short-lived United Football League. He spent the next few years getting himself into prime shape for an NFL comeback. But general managers weren't interested.

Olivea doesn't believe he was blackballed because of his painkiller addiction. He believes teams wrote him off simply because he'd been out of the league too long.

"I literally got bigger, faster, quicker than I'd ever been," Olivea said. "I was like, 'Ain't this a bitch? I'm finally clean and now I can't get a shot.'"

Resuming his life

Olivea knows how much he spent on painkillers: almost $584,000, all in cash. That's not all he lost. He said his sister and brother-in-law withdrew even more than that amount from his bank account on a debit card. They are now estranged from Shane and his parents.

Olivea said that Oben was the only NFL teammate who reached out during his dark days. But he said that at least 25 of his former Buckeye teammates did.

"It let me know how much I was loved and appreciated by my teammates and what great people I met here," he said.

Despite the stolen money and the sum squandered on painkillers, Olivea said he remains financially secure. But he also knows that money doesn't equate with happiness, and he believes he has much to offer as a coach.

To do so at the college level, Olivea knew he needed a degree. Since 1994, Ohio State has had a program for ex-athletes to return - at the athletic department's expense - to finish their undergraduate work.

John Macko oversees the program and said that about 180 former athletes have gotten their degrees through it.

"It's like another little team to me," Macko said.

Olivea enrolled full time in the summer of 2015. So much had changed. The campus looked different. OSU is now on semesters instead of quarters. Olivea was 34 and unfamiliar with the technology now used in classwork.

"I definitely was feeling my age at times," he said. "I used to write handwritten notes and type in papers and hand them in face to face. Now, it's the click of a button. Everything is online. It took a little adjusting, but I finally managed."

He took 11 courses to finish his degree in sport industry.

"He stopped his life and came back here," Macko said.

The desire to coach was not the only reason he came back to Ohio State. Ever since he left school, his mom never stopped urging Shane to earn his degree.

"She said, 'You've bought me enough gifts. I don't need any more money,'" Olivea said. "She said that the nicest and biggest gift you can give me is your degree."

So Jean and Al Olivea, along with Jason, came to Columbus for Sunday's graduation.

"I'm still singing," Jean said two days after graduation. "I can't sing, but I give it the ol' college try. It was a thrill."

Olivea has a couple of job leads. He hasn't coached before, but he believes he has the playing experience to do it well. And that goes beyond X's and O's.

"I feel I have an ability to connect with kids," he said. "I'm young at heart. Being around young people keeps you young. I feel there's such a need to teach some of these kids how to properly play and teach technique."

He also would be attuned to the risks of football, the same trap he descended into.

"If you got it, you can spot it," Olivea said. "I can spot an addict in a public setting. I know the behavior. I know the tendencies. I know what he's going to do. I'll be able to notice somebody going down that slippery path and maybe catch them."

brabinowitz@dispatch.com

@brdispatch

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